


Locating

by anticyclone



Category: Women of the Otherworld - Kelley Armstrong
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 20:49:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anticyclone/pseuds/anticyclone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paige, Savannah, and Lucas are making their way across the country when they make a pit stop. And, unfortunately, Lucas wanders off in the woods. (Set immediately after Dime Store Magic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Locating

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kolamity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kolamity/gifts).



> Kolamity, I had fun writing for you. I hope you enjoy the story.

"I think he's lost."

"He is not lost. He's only late by five minutes."

"Only five minutes? With Lucas, that means he's lost."

Paige sighed. She pressed her fingers to her temples and rubbed circles against them. At the time, leaving Massachusetts with her home in literal ruins, it had seemed like such a good idea to drive instead of taking a plane. Sure, she'd even looked at the map, talked about how long it would take, and decided together with Lucas and Savannah alike that the road trip would be fun. A bonding activity (though she hadn't used those words aloud with Savannah).

At the very least it was supposed to give them all time enough to sleep through long stretches of highway.

Instead, Paige regretted not buying a bottle of aspirin when they last stopped at a convenience store. Judging from the position of the sun in the sky, that stop had probably been about three hours ago. They were far from any sign of modern civilization now.

The car was parked a few meters away, tucked under the shade of a pine tree so tall that Paige had to lean her head back to see the top of it. Normally, she liked these kinds of trees. They had a pleasant smell and on trips to the South, where they were more common, she and her mother had harvested pine cones once to get at the nuts inside them.

She wondered if trying to harvest some pine nuts now would do anything to ease the tension headache building up at the base of her skull, or if it would just make Savannah think that she was due for another nap. A long one this time.

"Lucas just wanted to stretch his legs more than we did," she reminds Savannah. And herself. They had gone for a walk together and Lucas had kept going when Savannah had wanted to head back to the car. Of course, Paige couldn't let her go alone. So she'd returned too. "He's perfectly capable of following the trail. He probably … saw an animal, and got distracted."

Savannah let out a heavy sigh that sounds like she borrowed air from someone else's lungs to augment. Dragging her sneakers through the dust, she hopped onto the trunk of the car and let her feet dangle off the end. She didn't say anything else, but it was heavily implied in her silence that she didn't approve either of Paige's reasoning or of whatever Lucas was doing out in the woods on his own.

Paige tried not to think about animals driven to proximity near people from drought and famine. She didn't even know what the weather conditions had been like around here lately. For all she knew it could have rained yesterday. There was probably nothing to worry about. There was definitely nothing to worry about.

Circling around the area where they parked quickly earned her Savannah's staring. She turned to the car instead, opening one of the doors to sit down in the driver's seat. It did seem like a good idea to take a cue from Savannah and let her legs hang out the side of the car, though. The sun was starting to heat up the interior anyway.

The woods were quiet. There was no wind this afternoon. The trees quaked a bit every once in a while with what were probably squirrels, but Paige couldn't hear any birds singing. It might not be the right time of day. They weren't not parked near the road, in that she can't see it, but maybe that was still too close to traffic to have a lot of animal activity.

Maybe deeper into the woods, where they had been walking… No, don't think that way.

A few minutes later Savannah broke the silence just when it was starting to crackle in Paige's ears. "Elena taught me how to tell directions from the sun, you know."

"I remember."

It had taken up nearly a whole day. Not because Savannah couldn't learn fast when she put her mind to it. Especially when she was trying to impress someone she liked -- even if she wouldn't admit that. Paige had paid the best attention she could and liked to think that she remembered most of it, given how well she'd been doing with using the map on their way across the country.

The only times they'd gotten lost so far were when they'd been trying to get back onto the highway from some tourist trap with better signs directing people to it then telling them how to escape. Oh, and once when a sign on the highway had been more than a little misleading about what food options were available on a particular exit. Paige never wanted to see beef jerky again, after that.

"We should've told Lucas how to do it. I bet he wandered off the path to see something interesting and has no idea how to get back here," Savannah said. The back of Paige's skull gave a dull thud. "Do you think there are wizard spells for telling direction? I know that there's a witch spell for it, but Lucas still doesn't know many of those."

She rubbed her fingertips against her temples again. Her skin felt hot against itself. "Given that half their spells come from us, I'm sure he has one or two," she said, absently.

Savannah kicked her feet against the trunk of the car. "Oh, yeah." She mulled over that for another couple of minutes, while Paige let her head rest against her seat.

If they managed to find a motel at a reasonable time, she should call Elena. It had been a couple of days. Elena hadn't said anything specifically, but Paige got the feeling that she was worried about how she and Savannah were handling the fall out from Massachusetts. To be fair, when Paige was the only one awake in the car, she tended to wonder about that too.

Driving to the opposite side of the country to move to a city she'd never visited was not something she'd do ordinarily. She dug her heels into the dirt and shifted in the car seat. It was important to remember that she was trying to do something out of the ordinary here.

"We should go get him," Savannah said, interrupting her thoughts. Paige leaned out of the car far enough to see Savannah hop off the trunk and head around the car into the woods. She walked at a steady clip only slightly wobbly from not quite being used to her height. "He's only going to get more lost the longer we leave him."

Before Paige could get to her feet, Savannah headed down a sloped path and was quickly covered by shadows. Sighing, Paige grabbed the keys from the car and spent a moment making sure it was locked behind her. It was hard getting used to Savannah's tendency to go off by herself. She thought she had gotten a handle on it, but all that time so cooped up that Savannah was hardly out of earshot made this running off seem unusual again.

She was hardly past the first bend in the path, though, when she saw Savannah. And as soon as Savannah heard her, she crouched down next to something and started poking around in the dirt.

"Find something interesting?" Paige asked, trying not to smile. Even if Savannah was only waiting on her because she thought she wouldn't catch up otherwise, at least she waited.

Savannah shrugged. "Not really." She stood up and brushed dust off her shorts. "So should we break out a tracking spell, right?"

If they had been anywhere else -- parked at a highway overlook, or just outside of a town's borders -- Paige would've said no. It hadn't been long enough since Massachusetts for her to be completely comfortable doing magic as close to humans as she used to in the woods behind her old house. She knew soon they'd be in a city and she would have to get over that if either -- if any of them, she corrected herself -- were going to practice magic again, though.

And she was going to have to give Savannah a lot of practice -- careful, controlled practice -- now that her powers had been strengthened from the menses ceremony. A tracking spell was easy enough to use, and monitor.

She looked around the forest. "Let's go down the path for a while. If we don't run into him, I'll let you do the spell." The key chain should work well enough as a locator if they need it. Lucas had picked it out when Paige's own had broken several hundred miles back.

Savannah's face lit up with a wide grin. "Great!" she said, jumping back onto the path.

This time Paige was able to keep up, mostly, even with Savannah's height advantage.

\---

Fifteen minutes later they were both slowing down. There was a dry itch in the back of Paige's throat. Her headache was starting to spread down through her jaw. Savannah's face was flushed a bit pink, but Paige thought that was probably just from the heat. She hoped that, on her own account, this headache wasn't turning into a migraine.

They stopped at a fork in the path while Savannah debated about which way she remembered them going when they'd been here earlier. Neither of them could remember for certain, but they had a decent idea, and chose the left.

"Maybe he is lost," Paige conceded at the top of a hill a few minutes later. They had stayed to the path, calling out Lucas's name every few meters, this entire time, and hadn't heard a word.

Savannah looked over her shoulder. "Should we do the tracking spell now?"

Paige nodded. She pulled the keys out of her pocket and fumbled with them for a moment before handing the chain off to Savannah. "Do you remember the steps?" she asked.

"Of course."

Savannah clutched the chain in her palm and dropped down, cross-legged, between the first group of rocks she spotted. Paige side-stepped to stand behind her and gently nudged one of the rocks with her foot to make the wobbly shape they formed more like a triangle.

Then she cleared her throat and moved to lean against a tree to Savannah's left, hoping she was subtle enough not to be distracting. Savannah's shoulders were squared and her lips moved slightly as she silently recited the words for the spell. Paige knew them by heart and could read them even with the sun glaring slightly.

When she reached Lucas's name, Savannah spoke it in a whisper. Paige couldn't exactly see the magic around the key chain go out to seek him on their behalf, but… She could feel the click of a successful cast, and that was nearly as good. She breathed in and lifted her head, looking off in a random direction.

It seemed that even her headache wasn't as sharp as it had been a moment ago. Maybe she just needed some luck.

"Okay," Savannah said. Her voice was just a bit shaky. She got to her knees without pressing her hands against the ground, and Paige briefly touched her back before the young witch started forward. Her feet seemed to come too high off the ground for the first several steps, but she came into her stride quickly enough.

She continued down the same direction they had been going for a couple of minutes and then veered sharply. Paige bit her bottom lip as they left the path behind. They seemed to be passing a few landmarks -- a pile of rocks there, the only flowering tree she'd seen in these woods so far -- but Paige didn't like not being on the path.

"Do you have a sense of how much further it is?"

"Up a hill…" Savannah said, vaguely.

Paige darted to her side for a step and glanced into her face. Her eyes, normally crisp, were dulled and smoky. That at least meant that she was concentrating on the spell and that it was working.

She tried to reassure herself that if the spell had locked onto something from the keychain, it meant it had to be Lucas. Paige hadn't left anything of herself out in these woods, so the magic couldn't have been drawn to her.

When they reached the top of the hill Savannah stopped so abruptly that Paige had to loop an arm around her to keep her from falling over.

"What happened?" she asked, smoothing Savannah's hair back from her face.

Savannah huffed a few quick breaths as her eyes went back to normal. "The spell stopped. Lucas should be here."

They both looked around… to an anonymous hilltop with no distinguishing features from the rest of the forest, except that the path wasn't under their feet.

It was Savannah's turn to bite her lip. Paige's heart tightened slightly. "I was sure I did it right," Savannah said.

"It could have been the token," Paige started. "Maybe we should go back to the car and get something better to use."

The woods were a bit louder here than near the car. The trees rustled more and there was more than one identifiable strain of birdsong. Paige hoped that the only other things she was hearing were wind and squirrels.

"I could try again," Savannah protested.

She looked down and turned the keychain over in her hands several times. It was stiff rubber printed with a star and the blue outline around the yellow points already had a couple of chips in it. Paige regretted not grabbing something more personal from the car, like a piece of Lucas's clothing. But she'd been so sure that they would just bump into him on the path…

Savannah's mouth turned down at the corners. Her eyes narrowed, too. Paige inhaled and put a hand on her shoulder, giving her a gentle squeeze, but Savannah just slumped slightly. "We'll find him in a few minutes," she said, trying to reassure her. "I'm sure it's just--"

"Ah… Hello? Am I hearing -- Can anyone see me from there?"

Both the witches blinked and stared at each other.

"I heard you!" Lucas's voice came, although it wasn't entirely firm. "I am down here!"

The voice was louder this time, at least. They walked around a couple of trees and forward a meter or two. Savannah braced herself against one of their trunks to peer over the edge of a slope that looked more like the earth had collapsed recently than a natural formation.

Lucas was slumped at the bottom. His shirt was entirely rumpled and there was a clear stripe of dirt across his shoulders when he sat up and gingerly turned to face them. Even from a few arm's lengths away, Paige could see that he was treating his ankle very carefully.

"Ha!" Savannah said. She let go of the tree and clambered down the slope before Paige could stop her. "I knew that the spell worked!"

"I was… ah… regrettably turned around," Lucas said. He winced when Savannah hauled him to his feet, but she was tall enough for him to brace himself on as they climbed the slope. Paige looked down to make sure that her hands were steady. The headache was pulsing in her temples, but it was more of a pressure than a pain now.

"You were lost."

"I had found my bearings. I was heading back to the path," Lucas protested. His breathing was labored by the time they got back to the top, and Paige put an arm around his waist as much to hold him as to brace him. His steps were surer up here than they had been while Savannah dragged him up. "A few minutes ago I fell down that hill and twisted my ankle. I was resting when I heard you--"

"Lucas?" Paige asked, touching the side of her head.

"Ah -- yes?"

"No more wandering off."

"That's… reasonable."

Savannah hopped ahead of them and grinned as they headed towards the flowering tree. "Can we get one with a pool this time?"

\---

They did not get one with a pool, but they did find one with a decent selection of pay-per-view movies under the R rating. Savannah picked something with lots of lasers and people with oddly shaped ears, used up nearly all their change at the vending machines, and flopped down on her stomach on one of the beds.

"Toss me a Hershey bar," Paige said, sticking out her hand. Lucas was sitting next to her on the other bed, his ankle propped up on a pillow. He'd gone straight to the shower when they'd gotten to the room.

Savannah obliged. "Why do you think the tracking spell didn't show me Lucas was down the slope?" she asked. She put a bright red and plastic looking piece of candy in her mouth.

"Probably just the token," Paige said. "It would be better if we used something else next time. Something more personal. But honestly, I hope we don't have to use again before the end of the trip." She glanced at Lucas out of the corner of her eye.

He smiled sheepishly and broke off a piece of her chocolate bar.

"But I don't want to get it wrong if we have to use it again," Savannah said. She poked around in her stash of food. "I know it only works in a certain distance, so it's not like we could use it if we got hauled off somewhere, but I need to have it down."

Paige carefully broke the Hershey bar apart one piece at a time, handing one to Lucas each time he opened his palm. She was make sure to put some aside in her own pile. "Hmm."

"Yeah?"

"Maybe you could ask Elena to help you practice when we get to New York," Paige suggested.

Savannah blinked a few times and then grinned broadly. "Yeah? You think she would?"

Paige could remember how quickly Elena could jog. And she was sure that Elena had a good sense of distance. She wouldn't place herself out of range of the spell. Now, anybody else participating, that wasn't something she could picture -- but she thought Elena wouldn't mind jumping around in the woods a bit for Savannah's sake.

She nodded.

"Can I call her now?" Savannah asked, pushing herself up to a sitting position on the bed.

Paige looked over at the alarm clock. "It's early enough."

Making sure the pause the movie, Savannah grabbed the phone and quickly dialed the number for Stonehaven. Paige watched from the corner of her eye. Savannah kept the phone pressed to her ear for a minute before hanging up and hitting redial. If everyone at Stonehaven was outside, there was a chance Elena would hear the phone and be able to answer it if it rang long enough.

There'd been one night in their trip where Clay had left the phone off the hook, and Paige hadn't been able to get through to them, but Elena said she would be checking after that to make sure that calls could reach the house.

This time Savannah waited thirty seconds before smiling again. "Hey Elena!"

Paige smiled a little to herself, too, and reached to pick up a piece of chocolate. Her fingers had to stretch a bit first and when she looked down her pile was considerably smaller than it had been a moment ago.

Lucas just settled back against the pillows when she glared at him.


End file.
